Dick Cheney: The Man Who Rewired American Power

In War Dogs (2016), Jonah Hill’s Efraim Diveroli raises his arms and screams, “God bless Dick Cheney’s America!” It is a ridiculous moment in a not-so ridiculous film, yet it captures the surreal energy of the early 2000s. It was a world built on men who believed profit and patriotism were the same thing. Dick Cheney thrived in that world. No, he created that world.

When he died on Monday at eighty-four, America lost the most powerful vice president it ever had, and one of its most controversial. Few men shaped the modern American state as much as Cheney did. Fewer still left such a contested legacy.

Long before he was caricatured as Darth Vader, Cheney was a lineman in Wyoming, fixing power cables in the cold wind. He had dropped out of Yale, twice, then worked blue-collar jobs while courting his high school sweetheart, Lynne Vincent. She was ambitious for both of them. When he finally returned to the University of Wyoming in 1963, she pushed him to take his life seriously. He would later say she saved him from drifting.

In 1969, as the Nixon administration expanded the machinery of modern Washington, Cheney arrived as a congressional aide, already with Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in political science. Within months, he met Donald Rumsfeld, the sharp, forceful bureaucrat who became his mentor. Rumsfeld moved up, and Cheney followed him, first to the Office of Economic Opportunity, then to the White House. He was skilled at paperwork and people management. When Nixon fell, Cheney survived the wreckage.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford made Rumsfeld his defense secretary and promoted Cheney, then just thirty-four, to White House chief of staff. It was an extraordinary rise. He was young, pale, efficient, almost anonymous. While others chased headlines, he memorized processes and chain-of-command. He learned that power worked best when exercised invisibly.

He drove an old Volkswagen to the West Wing each morning and walked past reporters without a glance. Behind closed doors, he kept order for a president already weakened by Watergate. “The system only works,” he told aides, “if you make it work.”

After Ford’s defeat in 1976, Cheney returned home and ran for Wyoming’s lone House seat. He suffered his first heart attack during the campaign, then won anyway. He would have four more over his lifetime, each one a reminder that his heart was as fragile as his ambition was unrelenting.

In Washington, he became a loyal soldier for Ronald Reagan’s vision of American strength. He defended covert wars and voted for massive defense budgets. The Cold War sharpened his instincts: America should never hesitate to strike, and presidents should never ask Congress for permission first.

When George H. W. Bush took office in 1989, Cheney became secretary of defense. Within months, the U.S. invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega. A year later, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Cheney managed Operation Desert Storm with cold precision. The campaign was brief and decisive, and for a moment he was hailed as a steady, competent architect of victory.

Then, curiously, he withdrew. As Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, Cheney left politics for business.

At Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services giant, Cheney wore tailored suits and spoke to investors instead of generals. He earned millions sitting on corporate boards. Under him, the company’s expansion through the acquisition of Dresser Industries led to massive asbestos liabilities, and its overseas dealings raised eyebrows, having contracts in places under U.S. sanctions, such as Libya and Iraq.

Yet the job gave him a deep understanding of how corporate power and government policy could intertwine. When he returned to Washington in 2000, he brought that knowledge with him.

George W. Bush, then a candidate with limited Washington experience, asked Cheney to lead his vice-presidential search. At the end of the process, Cheney selected himself. He gave the campaign the illusion of adult supervision. When Bush won the disputed election, the quiet man from Wyoming was suddenly at the center of the world.

His office, tucked into a corner of the West Wing, became a command post. He filled it with loyalists — lawyers, policy hawks, intelligence veterans — and set about reshaping the executive branch. To most Americans, the new vice president seemed invisible. To those inside government, he was everywhere.

Then came September 11, 2001.

That morning, after two planes struck the World Trade Center, Secret Service agents burst into Cheney’s office and whisked him underground to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. There, in the dim light of screens and static, he assumed command. Bush was in Florida, then on Air Force One. Cheney, with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on the line, made rapid decisions. They quickly ground civilian flights and alerted NATO.

The vice president, not the president, directed the response from Washington. Those hours cemented his role. America was at war, and Cheney believed he knew how to wage it.

In the months that followed, he pushed through a radical expansion of presidential power. Warrantless surveillance. Indefinite detention. “Enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects — a euphemism for torture. He called it defending freedom; critics called it shredding the Constitution.

Inside the administration, Cheney’s influence was unmatched. He sidelined moderates and built the case for invading Iraq. He claimed Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction. “We will be greeted as liberators,” he told Americans in 2003.

They were not.

The war began with “shock and awe”. That was Cheney’s theatrical style. Baghdad fell in weeks. But the aftermath was chaos. No weapons of mass destruction were found. Insurgents rose from the ruins. American soldiers died by the thousands.

At home, criticism mounted. Still, Cheney refused to bend. “If we had to do it over again,” he said in 2009, “we’d do it the same way.”

For him, the logic was simple. Weakness invited attack. Doubt was dangerous. History, he believed, favored the decisive.

But history had its own judgment. By the time Bush left office, Cheney’s approval ratings had collapsed. The world saw Iraq as a catastrophe. The vice president who once seemed to run Washington now looked like a relic of another age. He was haunted by the war he insisted was right.

For all his public ruthlessness, Cheney’s private life was surprisingly ordinary. He married Lynne in 1964 and stayed married for more than sixty years. They raised two daughters, Liz and Mary. When Mary came out as gay, Cheney, who had been vehemently opposed to homosexuality, broke ranks with his party to support same-sex marriage. “Freedom means freedom for everybody,” he said in 2000, a rare glimpse of the man beneath the armor.

His health remained precarious. By 2010, he had survived five heart attacks. In 2012, he received a transplant that extended his life by more than a decade. His doctor described him as “an incredibly compliant patient”, an odd phrase for a man famous for never backing down.

When Donald Trump rose to power, Cheney watched with dismay. The Republican Party he had helped build was changing. His daughter Liz, elected to his old House seat, became one of Trump’s fiercest critics. Cheney stood with her. “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he declared in 2024, announcing he would vote for Kamala Harris instead.

It was a final, unexpected act of defiance. The man who once engineered secret wars now defended democracy against his own party. To some, it was redemption. To others, hypocrisy. But it showed that even in his last years, Cheney’s faith in institutions, however warped his methods, had not entirely died.

Historians will argue about Dick Cheney for generations. Was he the necessary hard man in a dangerous world, or the bureaucratic warrior who mistook fear for strategy? The Iraq War cost more than 4,400 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi ones. It destabilized a region and set in motion crises that still shape the Middle East.

Yet Cheney never apologized. “I did what I thought needed to be done,” he once said. “History will decide.”

He liked the Darth Vader comparisons, even played the villain’s theme when he walked on stage at speeches. It was a joke that wasn’t quite a joke. He understood the appeal of power cloaked in mystery.

When he died, America was still fighting some of the wars he started. His policies on surveillance and detention had been softened but never fully reversed. His shadow lingered in the machinery of government, in the surveillance agencies and the legal memos that defined an era of permanent emergency.

In the end, Dick Cheney lived as he governed: without apology. He once said he preferred to work from the shadows, because that was where real power lived.

Now the shadows have claimed him back. But his America — the one Diveroli toasted in War Dogs, built on contracts and secrecy — still exists, humming quietly beneath the surface, efficient and unseen.